Laverne Cox, one of the most recognizable transgender performers in American entertainment, says she has lost roughly 90 percent of her income over the past two years — a financial collapse she links directly to the Trump administration’s dismantling of DEI programs and its broader campaign against what it calls “gender ideology.”
Cox made the disclosure while promoting Transcendent, her debut memoir, in interviews with The Guardian and the U.K. LGBTQ+ publication Attitude. The losses cut across several pillars of her professional life. Corporate hosting contracts ended without renewal. College speaking engagements — a major revenue stream for prominent activists and public figures — dried up entirely. Even an opportunity to teach graduate acting classes disappeared, she said, because her presence on campus “could be perceived as promoting trans ideology.”
“I’ve lost so much money because of this administration,” Cox said. “I managed to stay busy with acting and branding work, as well as speaking engagements. But I never thought college speaking gigs would dry up.”
The mechanism, as Cox describes it, is institutional fear. The administration threatened to defund colleges and universities that support DEI or gender ideology programs, and corporations — having watched what happened to Bud Light after its partnership with trans creator Dylan Mulvaney in 2023, and Target after its Pride merchandise backlash — pulled back. Cox said she identified that sequence of events as the inflection point: “I knew we lost the culture after the Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light moment.”
Cox, who broke ground in 2014 when Time magazine declared a “Transgender Tipping Point” and became the first trans performer nominated in an acting category at the Primetime Emmys, was careful to reframe her own situation as a data point rather than a grievance. “I’m not complaining — I’m very blessed,” she said. “I think the important thing to note is that if Laverne Cox’s income has gone down significantly, what about all the other trans people who are not as privileged and as blessed as I am? There are material consequences for this kind of discrimination and scapegoating.”
She added that she has had to draw on personal savings and her retirement fund to cover the gap — resources most trans people, who face disproportionately high rates of unemployment and housing instability, do not have.
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Cox, 52, appeared at a Pride gala in Seattle last week and walked the red carpet for an animated adaptation of Animal Farm, in which she voices a character. She used both occasions to speak publicly about what she sees as an existential threat. “If we don’t wake up,” she said, “trans people will be exterminated.”
